Create Khan Academy Style Video Tutorials with ScreenChomp

Salman Khan, founder of the very-popular Khan Academy, creates video lessons for students on a variety of topics including mathematics, biology, chemistry and more.

Salman, who has BS and MBA degrees from MIT and Harvard respectively, was a hedge fund manager before he turned into an online teacher – a well-respected one – for hundreds and thousands of students around the world. Bill Gates once remarked that even he uses lessons from the Khan Academy to teach his own children.

How Salman Khan Creates Video Lessons?

In the past few years alone, Khan has single-handedly recorded over 2,400 video tutorials and his YouTube channel, available at youtube.com/khanacademy – has logged over 67 million views so far.

A BS in Computer Science, Salman started with Microsoft Paint (as the digital whiteboard) and Screen Video Recorder to create the initial lessons (like the one embedded above). He now uses a Wacom Bamboo Tablet with Smooth Draw to create these doodles on the computer screen which are then recorded to video using Camtasia Studio on a Windows PC.

The videos, or rather screencasts, are then uploaded to YouTube under a Creative Commons license and the raw video files are also made available on Archive.org for students who wish to download them for offline playback.

How you can create Khan Academy style lectures?

Salman’s existing setup for recording screencasts is easy to replicate but if you have an iPad, there’s an even better option for you.

TechSmith, the company behind tools like SnagIt and Camtasia, have released a free iPad app called ScreenChomp that lets you create screencasts with audio narration on the go. You draw freehand on the iPad’s touch screen – the app offers 12 colored pens to choose from – and as you doodle, your voice gets recorded in sync with the drawing.

The recorded video can be downloaded as an MPEG-4 file from the screencast.com website which you can then upload to YouTube or any other video sharing website. ShowMeApp is another neat whiteboard app for the iPad that offers similar recording functionality but you cannot download the recorded screencasts.

Finally, here’s a quick Khan Academy style video that I recorded using ScreenChomp.